The stage is set for two elderly men to strut their stuff. The journalist/politician/novelist/diarist Chris Mullins joins me at ‘Words By The Water’ on Saturday, March 14th.

Possibly the most beautifully located book festival, WBTW is celebrating its 25th anniversary. In a theatre nestled beside Ullswater in the Lake District, Chris and I spend a happy hour with an audience of 400.

We talked mainly about his latest collection of diaries covering the twelve years after he stood down from Parliament in 2010. ‘Didn’t You Used to be Chris Mullin’ was what a former colleague said when he re-visited the Houses of Parliament a while after his departure. He turned it into the title of a set of diaries which, in my view, are even more entertaining for their authors absence from the centre of events. His peripherality, together with what someone described as Chris’s ‘easy pen’ and wide variety of friends and activities, makes for a fantastic read as the diaries cover the momentous events of a chaotic decade and a bit.

We used his diaries and my biography of Harold Wilson to engage in stories, jokes and gossip with the usual literate and informed audience at Keswick.